An Opening in the Air (Applied Topology Book 2)

by Margaret Ball

  There, a neat summation leaving out irrelevant details like how terrified I’d been when both Bob Whyburn and Sign Man had grabbed me.

  “Oh, and I told them my name was Sally, not Thalia, so they won’t be able to trace me back to the Center,” I added when Lensky kept frowning. I’d thought that might make him happy, but no such luck.

  “I thought,” he said slowly, “we had agreed that you wouldn’t go to the meeting without Colton.”

  “You said ‘without backup,’ actually. And I did have backup – Mr. M. came with me.”

  “You knew that wasn’t what I meant!”

  “Well… like you said, a good way to avoid Friday night with my family. And I’d already made my excuses to them, so it seemed a pity to waste all those tactful lies.”

  At that point Mr. M. decided to stop imitating a belt buckle. “Are you implying that a callow youth from a cotton farm is better able to protect the Daughter of Stars than I am?” He raised his head, swaying back and forth in the way that had intimidated Bob Whyburn. It didn’t have the same effect on Lensky, but then, he was already acquainted with Mr. M.

  “You must admit Colton is somewhat larger than you,” Lensky said with the sort of extreme calmness that made me nervous. “If he’d been with Thalia, nobody would have grabbed her.”

  Mr. M.’s beak snapped. “Or possibly he would have engaged in a bout of fisticuffs which he would, inevitably, have lost.”

  “Guys,” I said,” please stop. Mr. M., there’s no point in arguing over what might have happened. Brad, it’s too late to fuss about it. It’s over, nobody got hurt, they didn’t identify me and I have a lot of useful information about the meeting.”

  “You only use my first name when you’re evading something,” Lensky said.

  “I need to talk with Ms. Melendez about enhancing this body,” Mr. M. said.

  “At least I didn’t call you Wladislaw,” I told Lensky. That had been his name until he encountered American public schools. Shortly after starting school he had persuaded his mother to change it to Bradislav, which at least could be shortened to something that wouldn’t embarrass him on the playground.

  “I think a hood like a cobra’s would improve my ability to menace people.”

  Lensky raised his hands. “All right, everybody, shut up! Mr. M., I need to have a private conversation with Thalia. Why don’t you go into the kitchen? There’s some nice stale coffee in the pot.”

  “You’re going to get him on a caffeine high this late at night?” I hissed as Mr. M. slithered out of my belt loops and slithered towards the kitchen.

  “Serves you right for trying to obfuscate the issue,” Lensky said, still with that unnatural calmness. “Are we both clear on the facts now? Specifically, the fact that you went to that meeting alone despite my express request?”

  “That’s not…”

  “You KNEW I wouldn’t have considered your turtle-snake pet adequate backup!” Lensky hollered as the shell of icy calm cracked. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Are you deliberately trying to drive me crazy, Thalia, or does this kind of thing come naturally to you? You could have been beaten up! You could have been shot!”

  “I don’t think anybody there was carrying,” I interrupted him. “It wasn’t that kind of crowd.”

  “Stop trying to distract me with irrelevant details! I’m going to kill you myself!”

  Fine, I wouldn’t mention bike locks or improvised flamethrowers. Speaking of irrelevant details. “Brad, you promised me you wouldn’t get mad and pound the floor with your shoe, remember?”

  “I’m tempted to pound you with my shoe.”

  Fortunately, before he could pursue this line of thought we were interrupted by a rhythmic screeching sound from the kitchen. Mr. M. appeared to be singing, “Rule, Britannia.” A moment later there was a thud. It sounded as if he’d fallen off the counter, but I wasn’t too worried; he was hiccupping instead of calling for help. When he rolled into the living room, holding his tail in his mouth and imitating a hoop, Lensky let go of me and fell backwards on the couch, laughing.

  “You had to give him caffeine,” I said, somewhat sourly. It looked as though I was going to spend Friday night talking Mr. M. down until the caffeine wore off. I had had other plans for what remained of the night.

  With one last hiccup, Mr. M. released the end of his tail and reverted to his usual style: undulating metallic snake up to the neck, where his organic turtle head had been attached to one of Meadow Melendez’s spare snake-robot bodies. He reared up his top twelve inches and fixed Lensky with his beady little eyes. “Did you just refer to ME as a turtle-snake? And a pet, forsooth!” He opened his beak wider and a stream of little blue-white stars poured out and circled around Lensky’s head.

  “Mr. M., don’t you dare do anything to him or I’ll – I’ll step on you!”

  “He,” said Mr. M. with great dignity, “had best not do anything to you.” He opened his beak wide again and the stars poured back down his throat. As soon as they were back in – well, wherever he kept them – he began working off his excess energy by racing around the room: up, ceiling, down, floor, going faster and faster until he looked like a ring of silver encircling the room.

  Lensky reached up one hand and pulled me down into his lap. “I give up. I just – give up. I know when I’m outnumbered.” His free hand slid up under my shirt.

  “Not in front of Mr. M!” I whispered.

  “Why, is he going to think I’m attacking you?”

  “It’s – I don’t feel comfortable, is all. It’s like making out in front of my little brother.”

  “You never mentioned that before.”

  “It never came up before. Normally,” I said with some bitterness, “he sleeps a lot and spends most of his waking time streaming videos and music off the Internet. But somebody had to bribe him with caffeine tonight.”

  “Um – how long until it wears off?”

  “How much coffee was in the pot?”

  “Oh, just a cup or so. Maybe a little more.”

  I looked at my watch. “With any luck, he’ll crash by midnight.”

  Lensky looked at his own watch and groaned. “An hour and a half?”

  We whiled away the time – well, some of it – with my detailed description of everything I could remember about the meeting. Professionally printed signs. Hefty sticks, much heavier than you’d need just to hold up a sign. Insane – or deeply confused - speaker raving about white supremacist Jewish Nazis. Bike locks. Home-made flamethrowers.

  In between my descriptions, Mr. M. sang to us. He seemed to be in a nautical mood tonight: “Rule, Britannia” was followed by “A Life on the Ocean Wave,” and “Blow the Man Down.” After he ran out of patriotic songs and sea shanties he treated us to a series of selections from The Pirates of Penzance and H.M.S. Pinafore.

  Lensky asked where he got his music. Childhood memories?

  “As far as I know, that would mean ancient Mesopotamian songs. No, ever since Meadow equipped him with wi-fi he’s been interested in modern music. Which to him, means everything from Renaissance polyphony to rap rock. But lately it’s been mostly Victorian-era songs. You should hear him crooning, ‘I Dreamt I Dwelt in Marble Halls.’ It doesn’t sound anything like Enya’s version.”

  Lensky shuddered. “I’ll pass, thank you.”

  So did Mr. M., eventually – pass out, I mean. He fell off the ceiling in the middle of advising us to stick close to our desks and never go to sea, if we wanted to be rulers of the Queen’s Navee. He landed on the carpet, hardly bouncing at all. I coiled him up and put him on a bookshelf, safely out of the way of being stepped on.

  On the verge of falling asleep myself, some time later, I remembered an incongruity about the meeting. “Lensky. You said this group was about sanctuary cities.”

  “Mmm? Well, evidently they aren’t.”

  “Did you make up that connection just to have an excuse to investigate them?”

  “Nasty bunch, aren’t
they? You should probably tell the Chancellor what they’re planning.”

  “I’m not sure it would do any good. Spineless little man that he is.” I hadn’t been much impressed with his public statements after the previous protest march.

  “Oh well. Anyway, I’m glad you’re not going to have anything more to do with them.” He rolled over onto his side and went to sleep.

  I hadn’t exactly promised that.

  On the other hand, Lensky hadn’t exactly answered my question about sanctuary cities, had he?

  Sometimes I worried that our relationship depended too much on leaving things unsaid.

  But tonight, I decided to let sleeping case officers lie.

  A topologist in motion tends to walk into the wall

  Chapter 7

  The next week should have been quiet, peaceful, and disturbed only by the sounds of mathematicians throwing crumpled-up sheets of paper into the wastebasket. That was what I, in my innocent optimism, expected. As usual, I was wrong about that.

  With no specific mission, the office seemed almost somnolent for a change. Mr. M. and Meadow, our robotics person, had gone over to the Engineering Building and borrowed some lab space, the usual arrangement when they had agreed on an enhancement and Meadow was ready to build it. His badly sprained ankle kept Colton from any more flying experiments. Ingrid made some desultory attempts to tutor him, but as with everything she did these days, it was clear that her mind wasn’t really in the game. Jimmy, temporarily without computer work, spent his days hoping that she’d come out to the public side wanting something so that he could bring it to her. And Lensky sat in his office, brooding and probably working out some new system to control me – or, in his view, to keep me out of trouble.

  “We’d better think of something for them all to do,” Ben said.

  “Why? It’s nice and quiet. And we can really concentrate on your idea of protective shields.”

  “Quiet? Too quiet.”

  “What’s the matter with quiet? I don’t think anyone’s going to make trouble just because of being at loose ends for a day or two. A topologist at rest tends to stay at rest.”

  “That part doesn’t worry me,” Ben said. “It’s the second half that I’m thinking about: a topologist in motion tends to walk into the nearest wall. Somebody is going to do something monumentally stupid. I can feel it in my bones.”

  It was rather ironic that he turned out to be the one whose ill-judged experiments brought chaos down upon us again. I won’t use the phrase “monumentally stupid,” but that’s just because he’s my friend.

  Actually, I blame Colton almost as much as I do Ben. Ben and Annelise were having an “off” period in their off-and-on relationship, and it was not tactful of Colton to spend so much time out in the public side, sitting by Annelise’s desk and talking to her.

  Come to think of it, Ingrid should bear a portion of the blame, too. She should have been tutoring Colton and keeping him too busy to hang out with Annelise.

  On Tuesday morning I was making coffee in the break room when Ben stomped up the stairs and glowered at Annelise. Colton was sitting on the corner of her desk and they were both laughing about something: two tall, good-looking, blonde, tanned Texas kids. A natural pair.

  Ben could have teleported to his office once he was out of sight of the librarians on the second floor; I assumed he was tromping through the public side to force Annelise to pay attention to him. Annelise, for her part, was laughing a little bit too loudly and being just a bit too careful not to turn her head his way; if he’d asked me, I could have told him this proved she wasn’t indifferent to him.

  Then she really put the frosting on the cupcake. She leaned forward and patted Colton’s hand. “It’s not really funny, is it, Colton? But don’t worry. I’m sure it will all work out in the end. I have faith in you.”

  “Work,” Ben said, apparently to thin air, “is something that does not appear to concern some people around here.” He spotted me. “Come on, Lia. With a pot of coffee and some undisturbed time we might be able to make some progress on the shields project.”

  He threw himself into developing that idea with a furious energy, as if he were proving to – well, to himself; Annelise was certainly not watching – that nothing on earth mattered to him more than our research. I went along with the charade; it was less tiring than dealing with emotions and relationships. Besides, the project was an interesting one and might well be useful.

  It didn’t take long to define the theoretical framework for the shields. It was simple, really. The basic idea was that you just considered the center of your body as being also the center of a closed sphere around your body. Making the sphere closed rather than open turned out to be the key, as it gave us a surface to work with – oh, all right, all right. Lensky says I put too damned much mathematics into everything and that normal people don’t want to know even this much, much less the details of the surface qualities that dictate what the sphere allows through. Surely that can’t be true? Oh well, maybe I can put the relevant definitions and theorems into an appendix to this informal report.

  Although leaving it that vague does make it hard to explain the problems we had in defining the protective spheres. Oh well, just take my word for it: the details are not trivially simple and there was a lot of trial and error that went into the process. And some of the errors were hair-raising.

  Once we had the sphere and its surface visualized, we wanted to – well, actually, Ben and I had some lively technical discussions about that. He wanted something that would stop all forms of aggression; I thought we should concentrate on just blocking objects with major kinetic energy, because the more thoroughly we sealed the sphere, the less control we’d have over getting it to admit the things we wanted – like light and air and sound.

  During the two days of our debates, Colton would occasionally pound on the office wall with one of his crutches and shout at us to keep it down, thus demonstrating that he wasn’t spending all his time hanging around Annelise on the public side. As for Ingrid, she occasionally let loose with a Valkyrie yodel which probably meant the same thing.

  The third day was blessedly peaceful. Well, it started that way, anyway. Around mid-morning, when I went out to the break room for a cup of coffee, Jimmy mentioned how nice and quiet it had been.

  “Yeah, well, enjoy it while it lasts. Ben still doesn’t get the need to define the surface filters as a countably infinite set, so there will probably be some more yelling and throwing of markers when he gets in.”

  “I suppose that was in English,” Jimmy said, “but the only part that I understood was that you think Ben isn’t here yet.”

  “Well, yes.” Solitary topologists are pretty quiet, but one does tend to hear such sounds as the rustle of papers, the crunchy sound of a sheet of paper being balled up, and the muffled curse when the paper ball bounces off the rim of the wastebasket. Ingrid and Colton had been making such noises; Ben’s office had been quiet.

  “He came in at eight. I saw him.”

  I blinked. “What were you doing here that early?”

  His ears turned red. “Well, Ingrid likes her coffee fresh first thing in the morning.”

  Dr. Verrick would no doubt have something acerbic to say about our paying a computer specialist to fetch Ingrid’s coffee, so I didn’t think I needed to say anything. In fact, I was not commenting on Jimmy’s infatuation so hard that it took me a minute to worry about what he’d just told me.

  “He must have gone out and you just didn’t notice.”

  “I’d have noticed,” Jimmy insisted.

  Given that about all he’d done that week was watch the wall that closed off the private side in case Ingrid came out and allowed him to fill her coffee mug, or lie down and be the dirt beneath her feet, or whatever, I believed him and I started to get a sinking feeling. Maybe Ben was just taking a nap – or – I turned sideways and ran the Möbius strip visualization to the other side of the wall. Jimmy tried to follow me, but I w
asn’t holding his arm and he didn’t even know what he needed to visualize, so he just bumped into the wall.

  Ben’s office is… not large. (His strategy for discouraging visitors is to work in a space only slightly roomier than a closet; mine is to have no chairs in my office. Granted, my strategy is more easily subverted than his.) Still, I was briefly impressed by the fact that he had somehow filled the entire office with a colorless, opaque substance. Then I realized the stuff was the surface of a sphere, trying to squeeze itself into the limited space available. (Yes, you can push, dimple, squeeze and pull on it. Regardless of shape, topologically it’s still equivalent to a sphere as long as you don’t poke a hole in it or paste a part of it to itself. Trust me on this.)

  “Ben! Can you hear me?”

  I put my ear to the surface but heard nothing from inside.

  I tried poking the surface. It reacted like an underinflated innertube, allowing me to push a dimple into it but oozing back into its smooth shape as soon as I removed my finger.

  I tried pushing my finger into it very, very slowly, but that didn’t work either. Neither did Colton Edwards’ pocketknife.

  And now, having borrowed Colton’s knife, I had him and Ingrid standing behind me in the hall and speculating on the problem. For once that was a good thing. Maybe one of them would have an idea on how we could break up a visualization when the person creating it didn’t hear or see anything from the outside world.

  “If he’s trapped himself inside a space that doesn’t allow oxygen to pass the boundary,” I said to nobody in particular, “I will kill him.”

  “How long has he been inside this?” Ingrid asked. When I told her he’d probably done it between eight, when he got here, and nine-thirty when I arrived, she looked at her watch and said, “Then he’s probably dead already.”

  “He can’t be dead or even unconscious. He has to be awake enough to hold the visualization in his head, or this thing would pop like a soap bubble.”

  “What if he figured out some way to maintain it automatically?”